


Roses In December Smell Of Blood

by Trovia



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Depression, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Memories, Mockingjay Spoilers, Moving On, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 05:23:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1457143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trovia/pseuds/Trovia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Here’s a little game,” Haymitch says. “Make a list of forty-six dead children, fast.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Roses In December Smell Of Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shesasurvivor (starkist)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkist/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Here's Some Advice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011477) by [shesasurvivor (starkist)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkist/pseuds/shesasurvivor). 



> Thank you for the beta, Michelle, and thank you, Nell, for providing me with information about alcoholism and memory loss. Thank you, shesasurvivor, for letting me play in your sandbox. :-)
> 
> The title refers to a quote by J. M. Barrie, the author of _Peter Pan_ : “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”

_Amber Carlway was the female tribute of the 56th Hunger Games. ~~She was fourteen years old. She had a score of three and died when she fell into a pit full of quicksand on the first day, after the bloodbath.~~ _

~~_She was pushed, I think by one of the Careers. I can’t remember who, that might have been the year District Eight entered that tall male volunteer who almost_~~  
 _ ~~I remember she asked me~~_  
 _ ~~I remember the look on her f~~_

_She was ~~fourteen~~ thirteen years old. _

* * *

… sure anymore, but Peeta returns anyway, slinking in through the back door and curling up in one of the old stained arm chairs in Haymitch’s living room, idly sketching a picture of a boy he knew in school onto a pad. 

He’s been thinking about trying out caricatures these days. His head is still full of this assortment of hurts and pains and Kat and the _other_ Kat, it might be nice to make a little fun of life sometimes. He thinks. Maybe.

Haymitch makes an appearance around noon, heavy steps rumbling down the stairs. He looks bleary, and of course, drunk, from the way he sways just a bit, when he turns the corner to the door. The side-eye he gives Peeta isn’t kind. 

“What,” he says in that low menacing voice that means, _I’m gonna follow this up with a quip that’ll actually hurt you if I don’t like the answer,_ “are you doing in my house?” 

Peeta wonders about that, of how this house must have been bugged in the days of the Games, everything recorded and analyzed, for blackmail purposes. He wonders, sometimes, if Haymitch let his house rot this way as an elaborate ploy to disrupt surveillance, covering lenses with grime, clogging bugs, or if it’s just what it is, a drunk man’s _fuck you all_. He thinks of that memory he has of Haymitch telling him to go and die for Kat in the arena, he thinks of that memory of how she made it clear he’d never be good enough for her, of how he’s still not completely sure if those are false, although everybody says they are. 

He puts down the pen. 

“Kat started making this book,” he says and doesn’t wait for Haymitch to… 

* * *

_~~Cavan Lockley and Ardee Lockley were tributes at the 68th and the 69th Games but they looked similar because they were cousins or something and they were the same age and I can never keep them a~~ _

_~~Ardee spit at me and said he’d make it without a mentor but I was drunk and I snickered at~~_  
 _ ~~Maybe that was Cavan~~_  
 _ ~~I shouldn’t have laughed but it wasn’t like he wasn’t~~_

_Cavan Lockley was the male tribute of the 69th Games. He was seventeen._

* * *

“…even recall all of them anymore, do you?” Peeta feels that he’s getting angry, which is stupid, because this isn’t even his idea. It’s not his project, it’s Kat’s. It’s dangerous, Dr. Aurelius has warned him about that, about getting angry like that. But he can’t help himself. It has nothing to do, he tells himself, with how it’s not _fair_ that Kat is obsessing over memories of people who she hasn’t even known, while Peeta can’t even get himself to remember last year without choking up about things that never _happened_. 

Haymitch is slumped in his chair as if he’s grown a part of it, his face screaming _I don’t care_ in that comfortable dazed way where the booze has washed the relevant feelings away. He blinks when Peeta gets up, pacing. 

“Here’s a little game,” his old mentor says. “Make a list of forty-six dead children, fast.” 

“Maybe, if you hadn’t been drunk out of your mind all the time, you wouldn’t have so many problems now even remembering…”

“Yeah,” Haymitch mutters. “That was kind of the point.”

Haymitch has let these children die, Peeta angrily thinks. He was drunk all the time and that was his _choice_ and he let them all die. He doesn’t care, like he didn’t care about _Peeta_ , and Peeta feels those bad memories taking over although he should _know_ they aren’t real and…

* * *

_~~Aster Cagney was from town, she was the candle maker’s daughter and she was the odd one out, you could see that, she was weird. Fucked up even the parade. But she knew she was dead either way because she was smart and when she saw that special on the television, about long-term district strategies, she asked me what’s the best way to die in there to help Twelve for the future. I laughed at her, too, shouldn’t have but still did because how could she even~~_

_~~that was the 73rd Games and there was no plan, there’d never been a~~_

_~~She~~ _

_~~Aster Cagney was the female tribute of the 73rd Hunger Games and she was the candle maker’s daughter, Hue Cagney, who went to school with me and who closed his shop after she died and never opened it again, because I think Aster had been the o~~ _

_~~Aster Cagney was the female tribute of the 73rd Hunger Games and I laughed at her when I didn’t know what else to do and I’d say she was a hero  
They were all of them heroes except m~~ _

_Aster Cagney was the female tribute of the 73rd Hunger Games. She was sixteen._

* * *

… down,” Haymitch says, and when Peeta tries to get up anyway, pushes him back with his hand on the back of Peeta’s neck in a strangely comforting way that infuriates Peeta nonetheless. “Keep your head down, I said, Mellark. Breathe. 

“I kind of thought you had that back under control, what with that being the condition of getting allowed to be in Twelve,” he adds conversationally after a while, almost not slurred, and Peeta breathes, breathes, all that red in his vision fading away. He knows it won’t completely go away but he still tries to picture a sun dawn, crimson fading to ruby fading to pink. 

“Dr. Aurelius says I can’t learn complete control without interacting with her,” he mutters. _I can only learn to not think I’ll kill her when I’m close to her._

Haymitch steps away eventually, hand gone, and Peeta feels lonely and lost. He thinks maybe the reason he came over to pester Haymitch about making the memory book is because it means he can do something for Kat without talking to her. He can feel close to her, without having to think about killing her, loving her, killing her. She doesn’t need to deal with his problems on top of her own. 

He swallows down that lump in his throat, his focus on Haymitch, unbalanced shape moving around the room in the corner of his eye. He’ll probably never be able to not focus on who is at what spot in a room after that Quell – Six’s Manoli at his feet suddenly, Gloss suddenly behind Wiress; outside the house, it’s worse.

He thinks, Haymitch has failed to save forty-six children and now he has geese, who don’t need to be saved. They only need food.

His lips are too dry. Everything feels wrong.

“You really can’t remember all of their names anymore, can you?” he says, voice cracking on the last few syllables, but that isn’t an accusation anymore. He’s tired. 

Haymitch settles back down in his own chair before he replies, all the way at the other end of the room, watching him, considering. Peeta doesn’t think he’ll reply because he never has before but then he does, and it occurs to Peeta that he’s also never asked. 

“It ain’t for a lack of trying,” Haymitch says, like he’s venturing into uncharted territory, very slowly. He sounds awkward, suddenly. “It’s the liquor, I figure. It’s messed things up, up there, you wake up in the morning but without a clue of what you did the night before. It’s all a blur.” 

He’s quiet for a moment. 

“They were all of them starved,” he adds, halting. “Most from the Seam, same hair, same noses. All of them dead. Some Games, most of it is just gone, I was too drunk at those. Others… it just ain’t feeling like the best idea, remembering those others.”

But he’s still sitting here, looking uncomfortable, while Peeta asks for names and faces he can draw, pulling them from Haymitch’s brain, tough like bread dough that’s refusing to rise. Haymitch is never shy to shut anyone out if they annoy him too much, which is most of the time, but he’s been answering Peeta’s questions all morning, pointing out flaws in the drawings.

“Shouldn’t they all have burned themselves into your brain in some way?” Peeta manages, not quite able to look Haymitch, who gave up on him too not once but twice, in the eye. _Maybe that one isn’t real._ But it is. That’s what Peeta can’t forget. “Shouldn’t they be impossible to forget? Do you never feel bad about that?” 

_Here’s a little game. Make a list of forty-six children, who you helped get killed to entertain the Capitol._

There’s another pause. 

“Yeah,” Haymitch’s quiet voice wafts through the room. “Every day.”

* * *

…until Johanna comes to visit again, all sharp angles and grown-out hair and scathing sarcasm if you dare question why she’s even here. She sleeps on Haymitch’s couch. 

Kat’s face looks fuller and healthier these days, and there’s a new surety in her voice when she talks about her book, about remembrance, about owed debts. She doesn’t waste time in cornering Johanna, on the lawn. 

Peeta knows that this is a terrible mistake even before Johanna gets around to her first sneer. 

“If you think I owe anybody anything anymore, you’re misunderstanding something about life as a victor,” she says easily. “I guess you’ve never had a chance to find out what that really means, before all of Panem rushed to save your ass.”

She seems to be having a good day because she looks like she’s about to laugh at Kat and mock her rather than gear up for a punch, not that Peeta can ever be sure with Johanna. But Kat can be stubborn and Peeta has a suspicion she’d prefer a punch over mockery. 

Getting between them to diffuse the tension, his hand is on Kat’s arm when Johanna saunters away a minute later, pounding at Haymitch’s door and demanding to be the fuck let in and saved from the younglings. 

“Other people aren’t my job anymore, didn’t you get the memo?” she calls over her shoulder, vanishing inside the house. 

“Let it go,” Peeta says, thinking he isn’t so blind to Kat’s weaknesses anymore now and sometimes, he surprises himself by thinking that’s a good thing. _Stubborn. Not the best at reading a mood. Butting heads with Jo._ Kat’s arm under his palm feels more solid, like she wasn’t quite a real person before, during the two Games years, before what Snow did to him. She might get mad at him, but it won’t feel as if the world is breaking apart if she does. 

He’s reluctant to pull away. 

Kat is glaring at the door falling shut. “It’s like she doesn’t even care,” she says. “She lost tributes in the Games, too, didn’t she?” 

Peeta shrugs. 

“Maybe it’s because she cares too much, how would we know?”

The day before, Haymitch left a list in Kat’s kitchen. It’s a complete, painstaking list. It tells them all the names and all the ages of all the tributes in the Games during the last twenty-four years. It’s in the right order, nothing corrected, nothing crossed out. He could have gone to the tribute rows in what’s left of the graveyard, read the fading names off the cheap wooden crosses there. Peeta’s pretty sure that the idea occurred to him, because it’s hard to picture Haymitch not thinking outside the box, but that he didn’t do it that way anyway. 

Another battle is raging on in Peeta’s head, images of blood and pain, and Kat and Kat, and torture in the Capitol, overlapping, rattling the cage of his brain and demanding to be heard. He’s learning to breathe through them now, acknowledging but not reacting, summer breeze and sun on his skin. 

The noise of honking geese drifts over from behind the house, waddling about and laying eggs and living on, although their home was once bombed into bits.


End file.
